Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (69 page)

To equalize their status and deter an aspiring “Cromwell,” this executive would be chaired in turn by each minister, changing every fifteen days. No minister, in or out of office, could be criminally prosecuted for conduct in office, other than by the legislature, a key safeguard, though censure could be initiated by primary assemblies. Condorcet’s constitution also afforded a mechanism whereby the volonté générale could rebuke or censure the legislature—a bench of public reviewers charged with safeguarding liberty by scrutinizing the assembly’s proceedings and convening the primary assemblies where appropriate.
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Condorcet’s draft, protested Marat, assigned no role to the (vetted and sifted) sociétés populaires, confining the electoral process and all right to petition and protest to communities. How can “virtue” and “the people” impose their will unerringly, eliminating dissent with the clubs emasculated?
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“All those whose vanity, ambition and avidity require disorder,” predicted Condorcet in his preliminary discourse, “all those amounting to nothing without faction and trouble, would unite to block the Constitution.” He was swiftly proved correct. The Convention had the text printed and distributed in multiple copies to all deputies, six copies each, with the eighty-four departments receiving sufficient copies
for distribution through their councils to all the municipalities, sociétés populaires, and districts of France.
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The Montagne’s reaction in both Assembly and the Jacobins was vituperative. Rejected out of hand by Marat,
L’Ami du peuple
scorned the commission’s work as unworthy of discussion, an “essai monstrueux” composed by “a criminal faction,” confused, ungrounded, and redolent of the “crass ignorance of a patrician.”
⁵⁰
Robespierre and Danton refused to endorse it. Robespierre, for his part, summoned “the people” (that is, Commune and sections) to ensure the legislature remained under their tight control, “to put their
mandataires
[representatives] in a position where they could not possibly damage liberty.”
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In an article published in February 1793, Condorcet charged Robespierre with deliberately blocking the Constitution and sowing dissension in the country, championing the “popular cause” out of self-interest, and manipulating the people using the pretext of high food prices to impose the will of a few major cities on the rest of France.
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Robespierre and his followers too claimed to be democrats. But their “democracy” was not the combination of direct and indirect democracy involving regular consultation with primary assemblies, petitions, and referenda most deputies envisaged and some militant Montagnards ardently desired. Robespierre preferred a view of volonté générale anchored in Rousseau that envisaged the will of the people as indivisible and collective, a unitary abstract with an unchallengeable executive (in effect, Robespierre and his aides). For purposes of swaying popular opinion, he combined this with what Condorcet called the “absurde doctrine” that every popular gathering is invested with a share of sovereignty.
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Representatives at every level of deliberation, from city sections and local primary assemblies to the Convention, according to Robespierre and Saint-Just, needed to be rigorously subordinated to “the people” conceived as a unitary bloc, able to revoke measures and recall representatives whenever these betrayed “the people’s confidence.” Robespierre’s methods in the Paris sections—rigorous vetting and scrutiny of candidate lists beforehand, vote-rigging, stifling dissent, and unquestioned direction from above—revealed clearly enough what democracy meant to him. The people would follow willingly, experience in the Paris sections suggested, where vigorously dragooned and with everything justified in their name. His was a theoretical construct backed by a highly efficient organization. To Condorcet, Brissot, and their allies, it seemed that Robespierre opposed France’s democratic Constitution of February 1793 because it would promote genuine democracy and social
welfare, guided by true talent, and win popular esteem, blocking the way to “charlatanisme, intrigue,” and “l’hypcrisie politique.”
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Explaining why he rejected Condorcet’s constitution as a basis for further discussion in the Convention on 24 April, Saint-Just dismissed it as too “intellectual.”
⁵⁵
The notoriously ignorant Couthon invoked its “immenses défaults.” For an entire month, the most vocal
anti-constitutionnaires—
Couthon, Tallien, Fabre, Thuriot, and Chabot—“like pygmies around Hercules,” as the
Patriote français
put it, heaped “vague and immaterial criticism” on Condorcet’s constitution as “un project aristocratique et liberticide.”
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Even Barère thought the virulence with which Robespierre’s followers denounced the Condorcet constitution rather shameful. Aside from Saint-Just, who assumed greater prominence at this point, the
anti-constitutionnaires
produced few real arguments and refused to discuss the draft point by point. Their style was to arouse public hostility through scornful, harsh denunciation. Those backing the Montagne, observed the
Patriote français
, do not read and were little given to logic, but responded to condemnation and calumny. Many were persuaded that Condorcet
was
an “aristocrate, contre-révolutionnaire.”
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Among grounds used to discredit Condorcet’s work was a relatively minor discrepancy between what was read out in the Assembly and subsequently printed, additional matter regarding procedures prior to the legislature’s voting, swiftly deleted by majority vote. Should interrogating the printer prove the Comité de Constitution deliberately smuggled it in, interjected the younger Jullien, the commission should be declared to have betrayed the Convention’s confidence.
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Despite three weeks of uninterrupted debate from mid-April to early May, the deadlock proved irresolvable while the tension remained acute. When Marat remarked the “braves sans-culottes” were insufficiently educated to suspect the dark, perfidious intrigues pervading the Comité de Constitution’s endeavors, he was interrupted by the radical Breton jurist Jean-Denis Lanjuinais (1753–1827), famed for his acerbic interventions: “Marat’s objections are assuredly the finest eulogy the Constitution could receive.” “Censure him [Lanjuinais]! Send him to the Abbaye!” yelled the Montagne. On 16 February, a Convention majority accepted Montagnard demands for delay during April and May, to enable the entire Convention to participate in the constitutional debate and permit dozens of alternative drafts and projects various deputies had proposed to be printed at public expense, circulated, and discussed.
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“It is from the Montagne that the Constitution will
emerge,” held Marat, “and despite this puerile, perfidious essay [of Condorcet] the expectation of the people will not be disappointed.”
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This wider debate opened with Robespierre, Marat, and Saint-Just repudiating the Brissotin draft constitution altogether. Presenting his own proposed alternative on 24 April, Saint-Just dismissed Condorcet’s work as “weak,” self-contradictory, and insufficiently democratic, creating a legislature that was no true
représentation générale
but
fédérative
and an executive that was
réprésentatif
but should not be.
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Condorcet’s constitution resembled Athens during the sad last days of her independence, “voting without democracy and decreeing the loss of its liberty.” Particularly reprehensible, held Saint-Just, was the Constitution’s avoidance of Rousseau and its defining the “general will” from an intellectual standpoint rather than as a doctrine that was essentially “popular.”
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“Liberty is not found in books.” Liberty does not lie in intellectual categories but in the heart—it impels the spirit. Direct election by the people rendered Condorcet’s proposed ministers “representatives” of the sovereign in flagrant disregard of Rousseau and would place every means of “corruption” in the ministry’s hands.
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The Convention must follow Rousseau who “wrote with his heart” and not “from philosophy,” never suspecting that in “establishing the volonté générale for the principle of the laws, it could, as in Condorcet’s constitution, become a principle antagonistic to itself.”

According to Saint-Just, more coherence and centralization was required with the primary assemblies being largely eliminated. Volonté générale was a collective will, one and undivided, not requiring elaborate electoral and consultative processes. Nothing less than defining volonté générale as the people’s spontaneous, active will was acceptable.
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While he too advocated universal male suffrage and equal eligibility for office, rather than a large national assembly annually reelected, he recommended a smaller body of 340 members (roughly five per department) more readily brought to converge.
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To ensure the candidate rota was truly “populaire,” Saint-Just recommended a single-stage, undivided national election by the whole electorate, every citizen in the country, he suggested, voting for a single candidate. All the votes cast in France would then be counted, those registering the most votes being elected. But this was technically not feasible at the time. Saint-Just’s scheme was certainly much simpler but not practicable.
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In the Rousseauiste ideal of a unitary populace, Robespierre and Saint-Just found a higher authority not subject to questioning in the Assembly or to active criticism from below. Such an abstract would turn
the legislature into what it shortly was to become—a passive mouthpiece of “the will of the nation.”
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Instead of directly elected by the electorate, ministers should be chosen by Assembly committees, hence, by the dominant faction’s leaders. Invoking “the people” as an abstract to erase the people’s rights and subvert democracy was thus implicit in Saint-Just’s and Robespierre’s stated doctrines from the outset. Indispensable to Robespierre and Saint-Just was the distinction between the indivisible “absolute rights of the people” and exercise of such rights through an electoral procedure based on primary assemblies.
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If all deputies acknowledged the people as the only legitimate sovereign, behind this phrase loomed vastly different conceptions, as was emphasized by Albouys in his
Principes constitutionelles présentées à la Convention nationale
of early May. “Oh sacred name of the people! To what point have I not seen you profaned and degraded!” The people is the source of all legitimacy; and yet those invoking “the people” most loudly, even maintaining they are “the people,” are the “men of 2 and 3 September, that is, a horde of brigands,” including truly abominable types, capable of monstrous ferocity. The first three articles of the new constitution, advised Albouys, should read: “(1) the people is the sole legitimate sovereign; (2) the people is the universality of its citizens; (3) every other association, or gathering, arrogating to itself the title of ‘people’ is guilty of usurping that sovereignty.”
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Concentrating on what was practicable, Condorcet had left aside his own preference for advancing women’s rights. But besides his circle and David Williams, there remained also other outstanding partisans of women’s rights in the Assembly, including Gilbert Romme and Pierre Guyomar (1757–1826). Guyomar was a deputy for Côtes-du-Nord who, during the spring of 1793, figured among Condorcet’s staunchest defenders against Robespierrisme. A thoroughgoing democrat, egalitarian, and one of the substantial phalanx of advanced French political thinkers embracing republicanism before 1789, Guyomar on 29 April reminded the Convention that he had published two political tracts in 1779 entitled
Citoyen de l’univers
and
l’Antinoble
. Braving the ridicule heaped on him then, he had persisted in expounding his republican views all those years without believing the democratic republic for which he yearned could ever become reality. Rooted prejudice and custom would doubtless move the Convention to refuse equal rights to women; yet, like Condorcet, Romme, and Williams, Guyomar vowed to fight “this prejudice” as wholly contrary to the
cosmopolitanisme
, equality, and liberty he and they professed. Is the alleged difference between
the sexes better grounded than claiming the color of the blacks validates slavery? If the difference between black and white fails to justify exclusion from sovereignty, so does that between the sexes. La philosophie had made all males one grand family and sought to unite blacks and whites. Reunion of diversely colored males of the species in the same primary assemblies will prove for all time the imbecility and depravity of men, and the stunning triumph of the philosophes over prejudice. “Republicans! Let us free women from a slavery that flays humanity just as we are breaking the chains that hold down our neighbors.” In Condorcet’s plan, Guyomar, like other sincere democrats, esteemed especially the centrality of the primary assemblies.
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A distinct Montagnard disadvantage was that relatively few of their deputies, apart from Robespierre himself, Saint-Just, Barère, and Billaud-Varenne, were intellectually equipped to debate complex constitutional issues. Even after April, most interventions still supported the Brissotins. On a purely theoretical level, Robespierre’s and Saint-Just’s ideology, though representative of a distinct variant within revolutionary republican theory, remained that of a tiny unrepresentative minority. With its uncompromising insistence on Rousseau, their approach was not just directly contrary to the Revolution’s core values but opposed to all the major currents of democratic ideology in the Convention, not just Brissotin ideas but also those of the Dantonistes, independent republicans like Poultier Delmotte and antiauthoritarian street populists like Roux, Fournier, and Varlet. Nevertheless, Robespierre could expect the approval of the many deputies disliking the radical democratic tendency, the support of all the populists wanting consensus without dissent, of Jacobin priests disliking Condorcet’s militant secularism and everyone wary of broad consultation and direct democracy.